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Conferences

October 21, 2008

It's hard to believe, but the US presidential election is only 14 days away, which means that the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby conference is coming up in less than 4 weeks. Continuing my series about the conference, I'm going to blog about some of the speakers I have lined up for you. First up are a few guys that I highly respect, am lucky to count as friends and unflinchingly call "Rails Heroes" because of their longstanding contributions to the Ruby world.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Ezra's talk will explore the history and current state of the art
in deploying and maintaining scalable Ruby applications. Over the last
four years we've gone through countless web servers and deployment
scenarios on the path to the ultimate deployment environment. Ezra will do a brief history of where we've been, where we are now,
and where we are headed for the future, including his groundbreaking ideas with regards to backend messaging
design and a world of services pattern.

Josh will be premiering a special talk titled "Ruby: Fragile or Agile". As a former Smalltalker, Josh lived through the experience of C++ eating Smalltalk's lunch, and will tell us what we should be on the lookout for as Rubyists so that the same thing doesn't happen to us. He will broach vital topics about the disciplines we need to exercise in using Ruby so that it can take over the Agile mindshare from mainstream languages.

Matt is also very good friends with Zed Shaw and was the primary author of our book about Mongrel.
His talk at the conference will show you why Mongrel is still relevant, how it works, how it fits
into your deployment stack, and how it can be easily extended to serve
custom requirements. You can get a taste of the subject matter in this InfoQ interview that I recorded with them last year.

Favorite parts of the conference

The Brazilian (and Argentinian) "Raileros"... Simply awesome and super-enthusiastic bunch of people and I was so glad to be part of their special conference.

The reception that my keynote talk about the "Hashrocket Way" got. I had a ton of attendees tell me afterward that they were very excited about adopting some of our Agile techniques and practices in their own operations.

Pounding the tables, clapping and singing "We Will Rock You" along with what felt like another 100 conference attendees packed into a sushi restaurant in downtown Sao Paolo.

The look on my lovely Desi's face when she saw my presentation slide promoting DevChix at the end of the keynote. :)

Keynote Recap

I'm going to give this talk again this year, so I'm not posting the slides (which were mostly pics of the Hashrocket crew anyway). My 60 minute talk spanned the range of Agile practices that we use at Hashrocket, organized by the principles of the Agile Manifesto.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Among several other core practices, Hashrocket is a pair-programming shop primarily because we believe that pairing is a key way of emphasizing and leveraging the productivity of our people in effective ways. I spent a lot of time explaining how pairing works and its benefits.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

As Bryan says, "Test all the f*cking time!" There are other ways to put this principle into practice too, having to do with the test technology that we use.

Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation

Onsite customer is important, and our location on the beach in Florida plays into our ability to attract people to come work at our office. I also introduced some ideas about visual design, and when you should do design work on a project, that isn't necessarily what you would expect from a believer in extreme programming.

Responding to change over following a plan

I showed off Pivotal Tracker and spoke about how we use it. I also talked about the importance of standup meetings and how to do those effectively.

September 29, 2008

As Dan Croak of Thoughtbot pointed out in the comments of my last post, there's also one major attraction to the Professional Ruby Conference that I didn't mention: Boston

The conference is at a killer location at the Sheraton downtown.
It's right in the center of action, is close to a ton of great stuff in
a great city. Boston's extremely walkable, and the subway is cheap
($1.25 a ride). Even cabs aren't bad because the city is so compact.

I'll be there and willing to play hometown host to any visitors
looking to experience the city. Looking forward to this conference a
lot.

September 17, 2008

I'm headed up to Boston in mid-November to do something I've never done before: chair a technical conference! The event is hosted by my publisher, Addison-Wesley as part of their support and promotion of my Professional Ruby Series.

Before going any further, I have to address something that some of my friends have given me flack for, both privately and on twitter: the name of the conference sounds snotty.

My publisher might kill me for this, but I have to admit that I had reservations about the name at first also. It might not always come across online, but in person I'm actually a pretty humble guy about my accomplishments and outlook. SRSLY! So plainly put, it was only once we started getting our speakers lined up that I was able to put my concerns aside and start getting enthusiastic about the conference and what we're going to accomplish with it. I hope you will also, which is a big part of why I'm writing this now.

First of all, I have to tell you about the format of the conference, which I take responsibility for defining. Normally, the AW conferences are multi-track, with 45 to 60 minute talks. I said: "No way. That sounds awful!".

RubyFringe sealed the deal for me on one-track conferences. Technical conferences should be kept small in attendance, have just a single-track, and short talks. Short talks are especially important, since all topics are not equally interesting to everyone in attendance (or god forbid I fuck up and invite a boring speaker) as long as talks don't go beyond 30 minutes then we're safe from completely going off the rails.

150 attendees, 20 speakers, and 30 volunteers is the perfect intersection between big and small

you do not need sponsors!

you should charge real money for your event, your attendees will thank you because it will be worth going to

make sure women play a leading role in organization and speaking

single track is totally the way to go, because it keeps people together and allows an ongoing narrative

Women are definitely playing a leading role in organizing the conference. The inimitable Barbara Gavin is the conference organizer. She's got a huge spirit and is very experienced with this stuff. Debra Williams, my editor and familiar face at Ruby conferences, has a prominent role in hosting the conference too.

I hope you join me in Boston for what promises to be an exciting conference. The registration information is here and in the following installments of this little blog post series I'll start covering some of the exciting speakers and topics that we have lined up for you.